Digital Meritocracy: Intermediary Organizations and the Construction of Policy Knowledge

Abstract

This ethnographic case investigates the relationship between the daily organizing work of one education technology “intermediary organization” (IO) in Silicon Valley, California and federal education technology policies. I argue that the IO constructed policy knowledge that reified discourses of “digital meritocracy”: a belief in digital technologies as a means of evaluating individual success, regardless of historic, place-based material inequities. To develop this concept, I trace themes of “personalization” and “everywhere” as they emerge in the IO’s daily work and in federal education technology policies. This study extends research on IOs as “brokers” of information, resources, and social ties between public schools and private service providers and argues that IOs also construct “policy knowledge,” or “definitions of what counts as education.”